Tom Magliozzi is one of my heros.
You might know him as one of the brothers who does Click & Clack, the classic car fix-it talk show on NPR. But have you ever read his bio?
This guy has quit careers in industry, in executive training, and in academia — all because, at the end of the day, he didn’t enjoy it. He wanted to avoid what he called the big W — anything that felt like work — and he did. Repeatedly.
I can only imagine the horror stories the people around him trotted out to convince him that all of this quitting was a bad idea — you’ll never work again, you’ll be homeless, you’ll never amount to anything, don’t you want to DO something with your life?
But, at least in his retelling, he blithely went ahead with all of the quitting because his lived experience mattered to him. And it’s clear that honoring his actual lived experience — not the social story about that experience, but how he actually felt about it — has not only led him to a life he enjoys, he’s gotten to have fun all along the way trying things out.
Too few of us follow his example — what with the naysayers in our heads and out of them.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine quitting a career we’ve put time into even though we don’t enjoy it, because we imagine just doing the same damn thing again — years of struggle and hard work to get to the point of not enjoying it. But what people like Tom Magliozzi show us is that it isn’t always like that, and quitting the thing we don’t like makes room for the thing we do like. Better yet, it makes room for the thing we love.
So think about your lived experience — is there a part of it, maybe to do with academia or maybe not, that you experience as boring, deadening, eternally frustrating, exhausting? Consider quitting.
Maybe it won’t happen today, or even tomorrow, but if you’re unhappy, consider quitting. And imagine what could grow in its place.
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